WILLIAM HAGUE has announced for two days running that there will be no new British military involvement in Iraq.

Less than a week ago the PM himself gave a guarded answer when asked why he voted for the war in 2003 — something along the lines of, if I knew then what I know now things might be different.

The massive media interest in the situation in Iraq has come from the dramatic and unexpected Isis advance across eastern Syria and much of northern Iraq. Now apparently they are advancing towards Baghdad.

It is 15 years since Blair’s Chicago address in April 1999 laid out his doctrine of a moral imperative for western European and north American nations to intervene anywhere in the world that they felt was appropriate.

The collapse of the Iraqi army in the face of Isis forces and the ongoing bloody car bomb attacks across the country are directly related to the invasion and the conduct of the occupying forces immediately afterwards.

The destruction of the Iraqi army and state machine in 2003 and the continual promotion of religious sectarianism by the occupation and the Iraqi government has given the space and opportunity for Isis to grow.

In recognition of the US and Britain’s rapidly reducing influence in the region they’ve now turned to Iran to help bring about political stability.

I hope in the process of reaching a welcome rapprochement with Iran they do not ignore the systemic abuses of human rights that are the norm in all countries in the region, including the supposedly liberated Iraq.

Equally the atrocities committed by Isis forces are appalling and have to be condemned.

As the US and Britain mull over their military options as to how to save Nouri al-Maliki’s government and the very lucrative supply of oil from Iraq, some questions have to be asked about the involvement of other powers in the region.

The presence of US forces in the region is very obvious. Less obvious is the role played by Western allies such as Saudi Arabia, which is not only the biggest arms purchaser from both the US and Britain, but is a leading supplier of arms and military hardware to Isis and to opposition groups in Syria, which are part of the same forces sweeping Iraq.

To understand how we have arrived at this perilous state, one has to look to two aspects of the history of the region.

As Sami Ramadami wrote in his excellent article in the Guardian yesterday, while he was indeed a victim of Saddam Hussein’s human rights abuses, the Ba’athist regime in Iraq created a functioning secular state that was not based on religious sectarianism. That is now a thing of the past as, following the 2003 invasion, religious forces now largely dominate the scene.

Second, the history of western intervention is hardly new and Isis’s claims to be reuniting Iraq and Syria take us back to events during the first world war.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant forces drew much media attention recently with their photos from the Iraqi-Syrian border announcing they were smashing the Sykes-Picot border.

At the death knell of the Ottoman empire, the British and French in the persons of Sir Mark Sykes and Francois George-Picot secretly carved up the region on behalf of Britain and France. They laid the foundations for the hypocrisy of the Balfour Declaration and the current borders of all the countries in the region, not least Syria and Iraq.

The Kurdish people were abominably treated by all Western powers after WWI.

After initially being given recognition this was then smashed away in 1923 and since then the Kurds have been stateless, for many decades their existence barely recognised in any country.

Interestingly Kurdish forces have taken the disputed oil-rich town of Kirkuk and there seems to be a de facto ceasefire between the forces of the Kurdish regional government in Iraq and Isis.

There is no solution to the killing and abuse of human rights that involves yet more Western military action. Ultimately there has to be a political solution in the region which bombing by Nato forces cannot bring about.

The drama of the killings and advances by Isis in the past few weeks is yet another result of the Bush-Blair war on terror since 2001.

The victims of these wars are the refugees and those driven from their homes and the thousands of unknown civilians who have died and will continue to die in the region.

President Obama is considering a targeted, highly selective campaign of airstrikes against Sunni militants in Iraq similar to counterterrorism operations in Yemen, rather than the widespread bombardment of an air war, a senior administration official said on Tuesday.” Iran has vowed to protect Shi’ite Muslim holy sites. Militants have laid seige to the country’s largest oil refinery. [NYT]

President Barack Obama has informed the US Congress under the War Powers Act that he is ordering at least 275 US soldiers and Marines deployed to Iraq as the country descends into a full-fledged civil war: here.

The catastrophe engulfing Iraq—with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) controlling much of its northern and central regions—is as much a crisis for British imperialism as it is for its US ally: here.

The German media has reacted to the crisis in Iraq by intensifying their campaign for militarism and war. Last weekend, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) called for the Obama administration to intervene in the Middle East: here.